From the 1840s into the twentieth century the political novel was a mode through which members of the governing elite and intellectuals attendant upon it developed ideas about Parliament, the party system and the people; and through which such topics were mediated to publics (political novels were often best-sellers). In part, Christopher Harvie shows, this was a conversation among the people who made things happen, in part the propagation of a myth convenient to the parliamentary system. Disraeli and Trollope are obvious initiating authors, and Harvie sets them in a context of other writers and within a full discussion of nineteenth-century political thought and events.